Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - US

Meebo Growth - Web Based IM

2008-05-13T13:19:44Z

I am a loyal user of Meebo. I never installed MSN Messenger on my Mac so use Meebo to connect to friends and colleagues from different computers and across Messenger and Google Talk. A couple of weeks ago Meebo received a handsome round of VC funding ($25 million) and so I thought it high time I share some stats on how the site is doing.

For those of you not familiar with Meebo, it is a web based instant messaging (IM) service that allows you to log in to all of your IM accounts and chat via their web interface. Last week (week to 10th May), Meebo ranked 13th among websites in the Social Networking and Forums category and 122 among All Categories of websites based on share of US Internet visits. The average session duration for the site was just over 9 minutes.

Meebo has enjoyed strong growth over the past year - with US Internet visits more than doubling year on year (+110%).

I compared Meebo's growth and standing compared with the alternatives listed on Meebo Now (an unaffiliated information site about Meebo) and found that Meebo is indeed the biggest of the web based IM players. The second biggest player is MSN's Web Messenger. Last week, Meebo attracted 19x more traffic than Web Messenger and Web Messenger's visits have declined 56% in the past year compared to Meebo's more than doubling.

Last week, Meebo received most of its traffic from social networks and search engines with MySpace the #1 source of visits. Websites in the Social Networking and Forums category accounted for 54% of upstream visits and Search Engines for 13%.

As many pundits pointed out when Meebo recently received their funding - traffic doesn't equal revenue. The challenge for Meebo is to monetize this traffic.

Coldplay Compared to NIN and Radiohead

2008-05-09T13:00:58Z

Last week we issued a news release titled Coldplay's Free Single Propels Website to #1 Online Among Bands and Artists. We found that U.S. visits to Coldplay.com increased 19 fold on the back of the band's new single, Violet Hill, being released for free online. On April 29, 2008, the day the single was released on Coldplay.com, the website ranked as the most visited website among the Bands and Artists category. A little more than 1 out of every 40 visits to Bands and Artists category went to Coldplay's website that day.

My colleague, Ben Kelly, pointed out that Coldplay is just one of many bands testing the waters with free online downloads. The record industry is at a point of major change and several established artists are experimenting with creative means of distributing and making money from music.

Last fall Radiohead released their album In Rainbows online with consumers given the opportunity to download the album at whatever price they were willing to pay. Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor produced an album for Saul Williams which was made available as a free download or a high quality version was available for $5. Nine Inch Nails have since released two albums online, Group I-IV in March and The Slip this week. Fans were able to download the first nine songs of Group IV-V for free and the new album is entirely free.

Radiohead's release was much more popular than either Coldplay's or either of the Nine Inch Nails releases, as measured by share of US Internet visits.

The other really interesting thing I noticed is that Radiohead's website traffic has maintained a much higher average ranking since the release of their album than before. This indicates that the promotion worked to bring fans to the website and that they keep coming back. Radiohead.com has maintained a position among the top 100 Bands and Artists websites each month since the release of In Rainbows (with the exception of January when the site ranked 106). Compare that with the site's ranking before the release - as illustrated in the chart below. In the past two years, the site never cracked the top 100, reaching highs of 147 in April 2007 and 106 in May 2006 and lows of 352 in October 2006, 360 in July 2007 and 359 in August 2007.

One of the key questions facing record labels and bands is how to make money in the face of peer to peer filesharing. Bands that build a direct relationship with fans may be better placed to make money from special offers such as limited edition albums and concert tickets. We'll continue to watch Coldplay's website to see if website visits remain higher after the release of the single than before.

Grand Theft Auto 4 Set to Beat Halo 3

2008-05-01T12:49:28Z

Whatever you think about the Grand Theft Auto franchise, the latest version (Grand Theft Auto 4) of the sex, guns and crime riddled video game is set to break all sorts of industry records. It is expected that Grand Theft Auto 4 will handily beat last year's record for sales, held by Microsoft's Halo 3 - and internet search data bears that out.

We've already seen searches for Grand Theft Auto 4 overtake those for Halo 3 by 22% comparing the week before the release of both games. Comparing the share of US Internet searches for the combined "grand theft auto 4" and "grand theft auto iv" last week (week to 26th April 2007) to the share of US Internet searches for "halo 3" the week prior to that game's release (22 September 2007), searches for Grand Theft Auto 4 were 22% higher than for Halo 3.

Last week, searches for "grand theft auto 4" and "grand theft auto iv" were sending visits to gaming sites and social networks. Retailers were not among the top websites receiving traffic from searches for the game. It is interesting that the so-called "game of the year" has attracted so little attention from the big retailers. This is likely a result of the controversy surrounding the game.

The top website receiving traffic for searches for the game was Rockstar Games (the studio that produced the game). Rockstar Games saw its website traffic soar on 29th April, the day of the release. Comparing the day of release (29th April) to a week prior, visits jumped more than 4-times. The top source of traffic that day was MySpace.com. This is likely a result of fans discussing the new game on the social network in one of the many forums on the topic.

Twitter Gaining Momentum But Still Niche

2008-04-29T13:42:52Z

Twitter, the micro-blogging platform, has been in the news quite a bit lately (in particular for VC funding and rescuing a US blogger). This has helped drive US Internet visits up further to the increasingly popular service. Year on year, Internet visits to Twitter.com are up 8 fold. In the past three months, visits have more than doubled and traffic continues to climb, up 60% in the past month.

As the following chart illustrates, the growth has been slow and steady with an acceleration in the past few weeks.

The chart makes the growth look impressive - and it is. However, to put things into context, the site ranked #439 among Social Networks and Forums last week and #4309 among All Categories of websites. Twitter's size is notoriously difficult to measure as there are so many access points (mobile phones in particular). However, the website traffic data does give some idea of the rate of growth and also reveals that the service still hasn't reached mainstream adoption. We blogged about this last year, reaching a similar conclusion.

I looked at Hitwise clickstream data and it appears that Twitter is building on a loyal user base. The site's top sources of traffic last week were Social Networks and Forums, Email Services and Search Engines. The importance of search engine traffic has been declining over the past year. Using our new and returning visitor filter, I was able to see that 71% of visits from Search Engines are from new users compared to 33% and 38% respectively for Social Networks and Email Services. By and large, new users come from search engines whereas repeat users come from other sources. The decrease in visits from search indicates that the site is maturing - but still growing. As more and more of the user-base is made up of repeat users less and less of the traffic will come from search.

Whilst Twitter continues to be a niche website, it also continues to enjoy strong growth. Clickstream data helps us to understand that this growth is both from new users and repeat visitors. This is good news for Twitter and we'll continue to watch this site.

Internet Searches Match Decline in Existing Home Sales - Revised

2008-04-25T13:57:56Z

Legend has it that Bill Tancer (my boss) bought and sold his last house using Hitwise search data. After reading yesterday's Wall Street Journal article about the continued decline in home sales and the stabilizing of housing prices, I checked Hitwise data to see what our data says about demand for homes for sale.

The following chart compares the share of US Internet searches for "homes for sale" (the highest volume non-branded search term relating to real estate) compared with the existing home sales (based on an seasonally adjusted rate published by the National Association of Realtors. (Note the search data is based on a rolling four week average of the share of US Internet searches for the final week of each month).

I ran a correlation analysis and found a very strong (.92) correlation between existing home sales and the monthly share of US Internet searches. This is about as close to a perfect correlation as I've seen and it got me pretty excited. (Yes, I am a geek.) The correlation is unlikely to be as tight over a longer stretch and I would like to extend the analysis back 24 or 36 months. (If you know of a source for the rate of home sales going back further than 12 months, let me know.)

Even if this is over only one year, it is interesting to see how closely online demand (as measured by searches for "homes for sale") and actual sales correlate in the past year.

This tells us that internet searches for "homes for sale" match the decrease in offline demand for homes for sale . We've done some work in the past looking at how internet usage data can be used as an economic indicator. This is a one small piece of that pie.

So, how do things look for April? I looked at the weekly share of searches for "homes for sale" for March and so far in April. Things are flat. The downward slide in demand may have ended but we are unlikely to see a recovery just yet.

NOTE: I made an error when I originally posted this entry. I copied and pasted the wrong column and so confused rate of sale with price. Thank you to Matt at Inman for gently pointing out my error. My bad... I did not find the same strong correlation between housing prices and internet searches. The correlation was .68 between searches for "homes for sale" and the median housing price and .69 for average housing prices.

Content Aggregation is King?

2008-04-18T12:58:53Z

A colleague forwarded me a fantastic article from Ad Age "It's Web 3.0, and Someone Else's Content is King". The article is worth a read for anyone in the content business. The author, Matthew Creamer, suggests that Web 3.0 will be about monetizing the web's openness and points to examples in the news business of websites aggregating other people's content for profit. Are content aggregators in fact growing in popularity? The author cites Michael Wolff of Newser: "The space is heating up". According to internet usage data, is it?

To continue with the example of the News and Media sector, I looked at the top websites in that category based on share of US Internet visits last week. Yahoo! News was the #1 News and Media website last week and Google News ranked #5. The fact that these two websites rank so highly indicate that there is demand for news aggregators. (Yes, I know that Yahoo! employs a journalist so it is not only a news aggregator but most of the content of the website is taken from other sources so I am counting it as a news aggregator here). Among the top 100 News and Media websites, I found 8 news aggregators, including Yahoo! News, Google News, AOL News and Topix

Visits to these 8 news aggregators grew 11% year on year last week. So yes, content aggregation is increasing in popularity, using website visits as the gauge of popularity. But, the News and Media category as a whole also grew last year - up 10% year on year last week. Looking back two years, visits to the 8 News Aggregators is up 23% and visits to the News and Media category are up 11%.

Growth in visits to the top news aggregators and the top content creators varies widely. Yahoo! News and Google News, the top two News Aggregators grew 8% and 21% respectively year on year last week. Visits to CNN and MSNBC both declined year on year last week, while visits to New York Times, Fox News and Drudge all increased.

Aggregators are taking a larger piece of the pie but the size of the pie is growing with visits to content creators and all News and Media websites growing. The trouble is - creating all that content is expensive. It's tough to justify the cost of content creation if those that sift and sort are gaining on those that create.

American Airlines Cancelled Flights and Social Networks

2008-04-15T14:07:07Z

Last week, American Airlines was forced to cancel thousands of flights for maintenance to comply with FAA safety inspections. As a result, visits to www.aa.com reached their highest peak of the past twelve months, up 9% week on week and up 25% compared with a year earlier.

Yesterday, I looked at Hitwise clickstream data to see where people were going after visiting AA.com. My hunch was that people would visit other airline websites to look for alternate flights. My hunch proved wrong. We actually saw a decrease in traffic from AA.com to Commercial Airlines, Travel Agencies and Destinations & Accommodation websites. Instead, consumers were going from AA.com to websites for Email Services, Social Networks and News and Media.

While we saw a 12% decrease in downstream visits from AA.com to Travel websites, we saw a 19% increase in visits to News and Media websites, 13% increase to Email Services and a 74% in visits to Social Networking and Forums.

The American Airlines website asked customers who were inconvenienced by the canceled flights to send an email to request compensation. This likely accounts for the increase in visits to Email Services.

The increase to social networks is most interesting. MySpace was the #15 website visited after AA.com last week, up from #30 the week before. Last week 1 in 30 visits to AA.com left to go to a social network. This serves as a good reminder that customers broadcast their experience to friends. How American handled the cancellations and how they continue to handle claims is sure to be broadcast online - and affect their brand.

Internet Behavior Signals Election Fatigue

2008-04-09T23:14:00Z

Perhaps having recognized the trend, I should have steered clear of the subject, but I couldn't resist. Internet usage data suggests that American's are suffering election and politics fatigue. Surprised? Probably not. A quote published in this week's Economist (subscription required): "To be honest, I haven't been following [the Democratic campaign] any more. I lost my interest." Quoting 50 Cent (the rapper) who originally supported Hillary Clinton, switched to Barack Obama and now he's not sure.

Here's a chart of the weekly share of US Internet searches for "barack obama" and "hillary clinton":

Internet searches for the Democratic candidates' names have dropped to the lowest point since the week ending December 29th for "barack obama" and the week ending January 5th for "hillary clinton". (The Iowa caucus took place on January 3rd). It's not just the Dems that are losing momentum - visits to the Politics category overall follow the same pattern as do searches for "john mccain".

If you count the Iowa caucus as the starting point, it would appear that interest grew from that point to just past Super Tuesday.

Perhaps it's not just to protracted race but the constant coverage in the media that is causing election fatigue. With the constant tit for tat on the news, who needs to search for either candidate? In any case, this is a great example of how search data can be a good indicator of the desire for more information about a person, product or service.

Obituaries Alive and Well Online

2008-04-03T13:07:56Z

I noticed earlier this week that the #2 website visited after websites in the News and Media category is Legacy.com. Legacy.com is an obit website. The table below shows the top 10 downstream websites from the News and Media category last week (based on share of US Internet visits week to 22nd March 2008).

I found this pretty interesting. We always hear about the death of classified advertising and how this is hurting regional newspapers. But this is another service traditionally offered by regional papers that I have heard little about.

Legacy.com was the #1 Lifestyle-Family website last week and ranked #53 among All Categories of Websites. Most of the top 100 websites are ones I am familiar with - Legacy.com is new to me. Traffic to Legacy.com has been climbing steadily over the past year with share of US internet visits up 81% year on year last week, up 36% in the past six months and up 15% in the past three months.

Last week, Legacy.com received 64% of its traffic from News and Media websites. The following table shows the top 10 websites in that category sending traffic to Legacy.com. It reads like a who's who of local newspapers. Most of this traffic is coming from obits hosted by Legacy.com for these regional papers.

An interesting niche carved out has created a top 100 website.

Google Docs Visits up 2.5 times

2008-04-01T14:36:52Z

I am a geek, I admit it. So much so that I did a little jig to celebrate that Google Docs will soon be available offline. My jig stopped abruptly when I realized that I was not among the few that have access to the early version. Nonetheless, the news (discovered via Techmeme) prompted me to look at Hitwise data to see how popular Google Docs and some of the competing "virtual Office" (word processor and spreadsheet) products are.

Google Docs received 0.0166% of all US Internet visits last week (week to 22nd March 2008). It ranked #290 among All Categories of websites. Market share of US Internet visits to Google Docs was up 2.5 times year on year last week. Visits are up 27% in the past three months. The increase in visits happened fairly steadily over the past year, but with particularly strong growth last summer - especially in August.

I looked at a few competing products and Google Docs is by far the leader. Open Office ranked 1,542, Zoho ranked 6,637, Edit Grid ranked 8,508 and Think Free ranked 9,036. Note that these rankings are based on website visits, not visits to downloaded applications.

The top source of visits to Google Docs is Gmail, accounting for 31% of visits last week. Google.com was the #2 source of visits at 25% last week.

Wikipedia - Where do People Go After Visiting Wikipedia?

2008-03-27T13:45:12Z

Wikipedia ranked as the 13th most visited website in the US last week, accounting for about 1 in every 200 US Internet visits. The website is hugely popular and with so much traffic going through the site, it is important to think about where all that traffic goes.

Last week, just over half (51%) of visits to Wikipedia came from Google.com. The second largest source of traffic was Yahoo! Search, accounting for 12% of visits. After Wikipedia, 10% of visits returned to Google, 3% went to MySpace and 1% went to the Internet Movie Database.

The following figures show downstream visits from Wikipedia. The first table shows the top 20 downstream sites last week and the bar chart shows the same report, but by industry, showing the share of US visits going to the various Hitwise categories from Wikipedia.

The really interesting thing I noticed was that most categories contain clear authority websites. Among Entertainment websites, IMDB and YouTube are authorities. Among Shopping and Classifieds it's Amazon and eBay. Among Music websites it's All Music Guide For Sports it's ESPN. For Finance it's Yahoo! Finance. For Health & Medical it's WebMD and United States National Library of Medicine.

A couple of categories lack one clear authority - instead containing multiple authorities. For example, among News and Media websites, .23% of visits from Wikipedia went to The New York Times, .20% to CNN.com and .18% to BBC News.

MLB Season Starts Early Online

2008-03-20T14:00:33Z

Major League Baseball opening day is still four days away but sports fans are already racing online for team news, tickets and gossip. Last week, share of US Internet visits to Baseball websites hit a high so far in 2008 and were up 34% compared with four weeks ago. Year on year visits are up 16% to Baseball websites.

The most popular Baseball websites overall were for Yahoo! Sports Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball official website. The top team websites last week were the New York Yankees, Chicago Cubs, Boston Red Sox, Atlanta Braves and St. Louis Cardinals.

Are baseball cards cool again? I remember these from my childhood. Can't say I ever collected them myself, but I remember others (guys in particular) collecting them. We've seen a fairly steady increase in the share of US Internet searches for "baseball cards" and more recently "baseball star cards" over the past year. As you can see below, in the past four weeks the top search with the word "baseball" was "baseball star cards".

Yahoo! Buzz Catching up to Digg.com

2008-03-17T13:45:50Z

This morning I was interested to see the thread on Techmeme's homepage about the success so far of Yahoo! Buzz. The RedWriteWeb story provides statistics on traffic from Yahoo! Buzz to some of the publishers involved in the Beta. ReadWriteWeb claims that Yahoo! Buzz "spells trouble for Digg". What do the figures show?

I was amazed when I saw the following chart- Digg.com last week accounted for only 10% more traffic than Yahoo! Buzz to News and Media websites. To put this in context, Last week, Digg.com received a 75% larger share of US Internet visits. Despite being a much larger site, Digg sends only slightly more traffic to News and Media websites. The chart shows weekly upstream US visits to News and Media websites from Digg.com and Yahoo! Buzz.

However, Digg still accounts for much more US traffic to blogs than Yahoo! Buzz.

The reason is that Digg's traffic is more concentrated to social media, video sharing and gaming news. I did a post on this a couple of weeks ago showing that about one quarter of Digg's downstream traffic goes to Entertainment websites.

I'll reiterate my conclusion from that post - there is likely room for a new entrant in social news media, but the landscape is crowded for video sharing and gaming news. So far, Yahoo! Buzz seems to be following a different path.

Spring Break Searches Rise As Students Prepare for Florida and Vegas

2008-03-13T13:48:06Z

The big weeks for Spring Break 2008 are March 10 - 21. In past years, this week (week to 15th March) has been the peak week for searches for spring break travel deals. According to US Internet searcher behavior, searches for "spring break" were up 20% last week but are down 50% year on year. This indicates that demand for spring getaways may be down year on year. Not so fast... Visits to the Commercial Airlines category are up 12% year on year. Looking at search data it appears that consumers are searching for airline websites rather than the more generic term "spring break" - likely as a result of ad campaigns by the airlines with offers and deals for spring getaways.

Those searching for deals are heading for domestic sun. About.com named Cancun, Acapulco, Florida, Baja, ski resorts and Europe as the top destinations. The following chart shows the top five destination searches for flights and hotels in the past four weeks. According to search data, Las Vegas and Florida are the top destinations.

For those looking to avoid the crowds of students, you may want to add these to your list of destinations to avoid in the next couple of weeks!

The Scot Heard Round the World - The Scotsman and Overseas Newspapers

2008-03-10T14:00:00Z

Last week The Scotsman published comments made off the record by Samantha Powers, an aide to the Obama campaign. I am married to a journalist so we spent much of the weekend soul searching with other journalists about the ethics of publishing off the record comments. Our friend Gwen made a comment that whether or not it was right, the editors may be patting themselves on the back due to soaring web traffic. Did the controversy drive traffic to The Scotsman website?

Of course it did - no surprise here. Share of US Internet visits to The Scotsman were up four-fold on Thursday compared with the day before. The site ranked #421 among News & Media - Print websites, up from #1,117 on Wednesday the 5th. Traffic has all but returned to normal, with the site ranking #944 on Saturday the 8th.

Visitors didn't stay long. The average session duration (again based on US visits) for The Scotsman declined to 1 minute 39 seconds on Thursday the 6th, down from an average of 3 minutes 51 seconds for the month of February. On Thursday, more than half of visits (52.66%) came from The Drudge Report website.

Crumbling Borders or Just Crumbs
This controversy also raises another interesting question - are borders crumbling as consumers increasingly read their news online? Not really... I looked at the top 200 News & Media - Print websites and found that in February 19 were overseas websites. Here's the ranking of the custom category I produced with these 19 sites. This is based on share of US Internet visits among this group of 19 websites.

Share of US Internet visits to this group of 19 websites is up 14% year on year in February. However, visits to the entire Print Media category are also up, and are growing at a faster rate of 19%. The New York Times website, the #1 ranked Print Media website in February alone received a 70% larger share of US Internet visits than these 19 websites combined.

The Scotsman may have enjoyed a hit online but acquiring loyal readers - and taking those from domestic publications - is a tougher task.